Lawless Sign Part Seventeen (Fiction)

Chapter 24: Beyond One Step

The thin, olive-skinned woman behind the oval desk settled into her padded rolling chair, drew a belt across her lap and locked the buckle. She plucked up her metal tissue paper cozy and placed it atop a magnet on the desk’s white surface. Kicking her seat back, she locked the chair into a circular track. Her fingers brushed against the keyboard on the desk, making sure that it too was somehow anchored.

Like everyone in the hospital she had heard the intercom counting down from fifteen. It was now several seconds past the zero mark. Nadine knew from experience that the countdown itself meant little. There was a feeling in the ground, a rotational slide, which actually heralded the onset of weightlessness. And there was usually an announcement before that, too. People were still milling around the halls. It didn’t seem to her that anything would be happening for at least a few minutes.

Weightlessness was messy, however. She wanted no surprising floatation incidents around her desk this time. Having made sure the strap of her purse was wrapped around the chair’s plastic armrest, she snapped closed its flap and tugged the change compartment’s zipper to the end. Her foot went to the pedal of a trash can. Its lid rose and she dropped the tissues she had wadded in her hand.

Nadine’s computer screen showed grids and streaming lines of text. It was part of her job to check for any status updates on the instant messaging system. So far the computer displayed that the hospital’s phone lines had all been switched to voice mail forwarding and that the internet was now disconnected. A box was giving a countdown to the termination of cellular telephone contact, which was the most accurate indicator of impending weightlessness that Nadine knew of. The powers that be were addicted to their cell phones and wireless pads. Nothing would happen until all communication via such had subsided. At that moment, the countdown had halted.

A tall, broad shouldered man emerged from the hallway to her right. Unlike most of the assorted staff present, he wasn’t wearing scrubs, but rather a flight suit. It was similar to the one worn by Sal Lieberman, but had a different shoulder patch. The man’s hair was flaming red and without a part or sideburns. This hair was really a cheap wig. It covered the extensive surgical plate that ran from just above his brow to right behind his ears.

Nadine had known this man for seven years. His name was Joe Doaks. He had spent the entirety of the first two years of their acquaintance comatose. It was Nadine who had given the seemingly homeless, brain damaged man his name. Five years ago the man woke up. After a year of physical rehab, wherein he gained nearly seventy pounds, Doaks was given a job here. She wasn’t entirely clear what it was Doaks did, but he was always very active on space days.

Doaks had a face like a mirror. His every emotion ran across it. With a glance, Nadine could tell something wasn’t right. She asked “Issues, Joe?”

“We are missing some atmospheres,” Doaks said in an accent originating galaxies away. Meteor Beasts are gifted, but even that has its limits.

The Meteor Beast was right: there was quite a bit of air missing from the hospital. We had let quite a bit out when I released the prisoners. Although the automated systems were under Claudia’s control and thus not registering it, Doaks must have read something on a manual system which told him otherwise. It seemed that Doaks was a veteran spaceman since his concern wasn’t with the amount of air that was missing, but rather the possible presence of a leak.

Nadine asked “Do you want me to ring Young Cole? I think his cell is available.”

“Still with the vets?” he asked, then adding “Your eyes. What’s wrong?”

“Personal issue,” she said, glancing up at the screen. “Says here the air pressure is normal.--You know how Young Cole is. Like we don’t pay these foreigners enough, he has to pamper them too. I think he should be done with the whole little show in a minute or two. Do you want me to ring him once he’s done?”

“Do please,” Doaks said. “I’m going to check the sensors in the basement. Turn the elevator back on for me.”

Claudia asked if she should slow the elevator down or make it malfunction. At this point it didn’t matter. Sulfur and I had already found the air duct tube and had sealed ourselves in. My companion was reaching a skeletal hand up to the rung beneath my feet. The tube we were in ran parallel with the back of a closet wall on the main floor. I was viewing the activity at Nadine’s desk through a mesh screen in this wall.

Somewhere to the left of the closet’s opening was a shower stall-sized transparent plastic aquarium. Tubes sprouted out its top transom. These were connected to a clump of plastic boxes mounted atop what looked to me to be a lamp on rollers. Inside the tank’s bubbling interior bobbed a quite contented and animated Corona Surfer. It had a long fleshy pink arm dangling out the tank’s top. Its four sucker-tipped fingers were pressing a paperback novel against the glass. I’m guessing that one of its many independently roving eyes was reading.

A television chattered just beyond my view. There was a radio playing, too.

I was starting to have some reservations about this. Was I really going to shoot this place up?

My theory was that I had Sparky trapped the moment the Voliant Wave event started. I thought he would be unable to switch into any of the spare bodies he had stowed all over the countryside. As long as I had him here, he could only transfer to the bodies he had in the hospital. For reasons of preserving my confidence in this endeavor, I guessed that he only had two: the one he was using and the brain dead elderly version of Cole that was occupying a bed on this floor.

I had nothing to back any of that up.

The truth is that I am here because I represent the absolute worst in my race,  am an example of the most degenerate bent of my trade. I embody everything wrong with my nation, my religion and my sex.

I came here to snap this thing’s neck--and that’s what I am going to do. I would trust the machinations of human society, chance the odd whirl of their justice, but that just isn’t within my philosophy. I am witness to the massacre in The Garden. The dead of Tiamore are calling. If there is to be an answer, I will provide it. And other gibberish like that.

Not quite full blood lust, but it’s loaded.

As if I wasn’t bad enough, my undead wingman is a certifiable Kamikaze pilot. Sulfur’s content to kill everyone in here, innocent or guilty. For all I know, it’s his immutable goal. This was all set for disaster. The only question was scale.

The silver elevator doors parted and Doaks disappeared. My view then became dominated by a nurse, a thin red headed woman, who had entered the Corona Surfer’s room. The young woman had a plastic baggie in her hands which she proceeded to cover a flower arrangement with. Once bagged, the flowers were placed in a wooden cabinet. She picked a pen off the floor and seemed to be scanning the room for stray unanchored things.

The nurse came to hover in front of the aquarium. She said “You almost through with that chapter, Sweetie? The TV and the CD player can stay on, but you’re going to have to put your hand back in. Water good?”

She casually lifted the paperback from the creature’s hand and walked it to the cabinet where the flowers were stowed. The Corona Surfer may have said something at this point, but I didn’t catch it. The nurse sealed the book in a compartment with a stack of other books and then swung around back to the aquarium, saying “No, I don’t know where the Orient Express ran between. That takes place between the wars. It’s her most famous one, but I don’t think it’s one of her best. You’re not going to like the ending.”

The nurse looked the aquarium up and down. “Yeah, it does look like any of them could have done it. That’s the way it is with those.—The closet?”

She shot a glance in my direction. For a moment I thought the nurse was looking me straight in the eyes. Her attention quickly turned to the tank again. “I don’t see anything. Or hear anything. We are about to float, so all sorts of stuff goes on. Would you like me to get you another CD? I think Cats finally came in. I’ll check back with you after we take off.”

No sooner had she drifted out of my field of vision when Sparky appeared at Nadine’s oval desk island. He was Royce Cole’s youngest version, a thin man in his late twenties to early thirties. Like all of the Royce Coles, he sported a baggy grey pinstripe suit and a white straw hat. He had a surgical mask pulled down, drooping beneath his pointed chin. He asked “Leon?”

“Mister Bernstein is not picking up,” Nadine reported.

“He’s either embarrassed or he’s chickening out. I’ll bet anything the police aren’t buying his line of crap. So I have an intervention to look forward to after all this,” Sparky said. “Kill the cell phones in three minutes. Put on the NBC chimes at the one minute mark. Send the usual text at the same time. Then initiate.”

“Joe Doaks wants to talk to you before we initiate,” Nadine said.

“Eyes? Problem? Talk to Destiny,” he said, leaning over her desk.

“It’s nothing,” she muttered.

Sparky hissed “Is that young man still abusing your daughter? He doesn’t have to live, you know? You work for mobsters. Say the word. It will be as if he never existed.”

“You’re very kind, but no,” Nadine said softly.

Sparky was the last of the operational versions of Royce Cole.  The Old Man had been crafting Royce Cole like bodies from the beginning. They aged as per normal. Originally the Old Man would use a body until it wore out and then, at some point, create a new one, leaving the old one dead. That process was good enough, until he discovered the Voliant Wave. Like everyone else who discovered the Voliant Wave, he came to abuse it—at times aging himself years in a single session. Soon the Old Man had need of an industry for creating his new bodies. Sometime after discovering the library, the Old Man hit upon the idea of spreading his essence about, inhabiting more than one body simultaneously.

In short, it took the thing about 4000 years to figure out how to reproduce. His previous intermingling with humans did nothing to promulgate the inner smoke signal. Blowing smoke into his own clones, however, wasn’t perfect either. To the Old Man’s surprise, the clones only had part of his memories and only the potential to achieve the original’s abilities. He tried several methods, including subdividing himself almost equally into several parts, but none of them were quite the exact duplicate.

I guess the Old Man was willing to live with it. Sparky here is a bit of a black sheep. Ghengis Khan never ran through his wife. The whole concept of man being on a march to extinction is something he has been told, but not concluded for himself. He was unreconstructed, with fresh memories of having been the general Alcibiades and a distant recollection of having been Osiris, but nothing more modern. He may have soaked up modern trappings, but not much of the Old Man’s hard won perspective. And he did not think of himself as a junior member. Once the Old Man was incapacitated, being equals with the other avatars went out the window. Thus leading to the end of the other avatars and, unfortunately, the people of Tiamore.

“I’m not being kind. I’m ruthless and murderous. But I am paternalistic,” Sparky said. “It’s my one saving grace.”

The only thing saving him at that moment was that we weren’t in scab space yet. It crossed my mind to take him then and there. If he held that position, I had a good shot—providing that anything I had was capable of taking him down. I held off.

“Do you want me to initiate or do you want to talk to Joe first?” Nadine asked.

“Initiate. We can call off any time before the decoupling. Get the magnetic turrets set to disarm,” Sparky said. “Where is Mister Doaks?”

She answered “Basement.”

“Looking for something to blow, no doubt,” he said, striding to the elevator doors. “I have more concern for the prospects of the zero gravity Crème Brule Chef Sprocket is attempting than I do eruption from the pipes below.”

The elevator did come. The scene didn’t shift much for the next few seconds. If Sulfur and I had not suddenly found ourselves floating, we would have had no inkling that the ship had taken off or that we were now in another realm of being.

A moment later the figure of an amused surgical tech came cart wheeling past the room’s doorway. Some other shoeless individuals paraded after him, all floating and pushing themselves off the walls. By this time I had handed the rear panel from the closet down to Sulfur. I didn’t think that any of the people bounding through the hall had spotted me.

The same could not be said about the Corona Surfer whose room I was about to invade. The pink thing had constricted, becoming a fuzzy ball at the back of her aquarium. I think she was signaling the nursing station.

Nadine pivoted her head in the direction of the Corona Surfer’s room. At that moment Cole came scampering out of a staircase across from the desk, saying “I can’t find Joe. We didn’t blow. So I guess he was wrong.”

“Gonor, narotene,” blurted a box on the aquarium’s side. It must have been terrifying for the Corona Surfer. A cybernetic space pirate had invaded her sick room--and promptly reduced her human benefactor to spewing gore and flying organs.

I hit Sparky with everything I had. My baton went through his back and out his chest. The radial waves from my helmet shoved him up and off his feet, pulverizing him across the wall behind the desk. Purple light from the scrambler on my belt drenched the area and then fled in sticky globs.

No sooner had the baton made its last bounce back to my hand, when Sulfur bolted ahead of me. He un-slung his scythe and dove into the ball. A guttural yell followed. Someone was on the business end of Sulfur’s curved blade.

I had not killed Sparky. I had laid waste to that body. I thought that this might be a two round fight, but I was not prepared for what I had just seen.

The grizzly figure of Nadine rose, bursting out of her seat belt. She yowled “You murdered her! You maniac!”

That wasn’t a typo. She said ‘her’ and by her she meant herself. By ‘you’ she meant me, but that was just self-justification. The moment I hit Sparky with the scrambler I saw a thorny snake of smoke exit his body and arc into Nadine’s.

I didn’t know he could do that. Judging by what he said, it seemed the process of body jumping caused irreversible harm to normal humans. That Sparky was a bit squeamish about this I guess is to his credit. (He was just squeamish enough to complain after he did it.) The bottom line was that he could jump into any human here. That left me contemplating the endearing possibility of having to kill all of the humans in the hospital.

That would be what seemed to be Sulfur’s plan. We were two seconds into this and we already had three dead people. Thanks to Sulfur’s indiscriminate dispatching of two medical techs and my own mayhem, the front desk area had gone from primarily white to primarily red.

I advanced from the Corona Surfer’s room, propelled by the floaty belt. Nadine was floating in a crouch, her knees just above the desk level. Sparky had jumped to Nadine simply because she was close. He didn’t have any of Royce Cole’s formidable abilities while inside a regulation body. Now that he had his wits about him, Sparky chanced Nadine asking me “What do you want?”

In another universe, maybe I said something to him. In this universe, I didn’t want to tip my hand. I discovered at that moment that he couldn’t see Sulfur. He had never been able to see Sulfur—and couldn’t do it through Nadine’s eyes, either. He thought I had killed the medical techs, but couldn’t figure out how.

Sulfur leapt in the direction of the stairwell. His boney free hand caught the door jamb. He must have sensed something that I couldn’t.

It then dawned on Sparky that I was reading his mind. He could not reach back and was defenseless while still inside Nadine. My scrambler was back up and I triggered it. Nadine and her splattered desk were engulfed in a purple flash.

He was going to be leaving Nadine either way. Nadine was dead the moment Sparky entered her and his exit made that plain. Black smoke rolled out of her mouth and nose. Her head lolled. The woman’s limbs floated without intention, as if she was bobbing in liquid.

And I failed to kill it again. The impression I got from the fleeing giant smoke hose was more terror than pain. Sparky was a big thing—and lightning fast. It took the thorny vine a good second to clear the lobby, trailing a sonic boom in its wake. The thing was simultaneously running across the ceiling, floor and walls as it streaked down the hall, its path ending at the last door on the right.

Joe Doaks shot out of the stairwell behind me. In Joe’s hand was a metal rod with a lampshade like tip. This was a rather common spaceman device, a hand held jet. I used to have one. Every crew member on every freighter I’ve ever been on has had one. Joe even had the strap wrapped around his wrist the right way. These things are much faster than the floaty belt, although they only work in zero gravity.

It didn’t do Joe one bit of good. The moment he cleared the doorway, Sulfur planted the scythe’s curved blade right between his shoulders. The tip burst through his left breast.

I couldn’t read Joe’s mind, but he looked surprised. He might have even been miffed. Sadly, he was not dead, nor really that badly impaired.

I’m not sure if Sulfur knew what he was dealing with. Meteor Beasts were notorious for being able to fight on, even when decapitated. It was said that they could manipulate their severed limbs at close range.

All of that said, I had killed the last transplanted Meteor Beasts I ran into with a low radial blast from the scrambler. I was building up the scrambler’s charge at the time, but that’s no excuse for enjoining this thing in hand to hand combat--which is what I did.

Doaks tilted his jet mast and orbited about. Having let go of his now imbedded scythe, Sulfur flipped backward. It seemed to me that Sulfur was drawing another weapon from his hip. I bashed my baton against Joe’s head and loosed a radial blast powerful enough to smash him flat.

The rotation we had been expecting, the one that supposedly heralded the start of weightlessness, happened at some point during this. Our entire environment took a quarter turn to the right.

Most importantly, from that immediate perspective, the window imploded. I honestly don’t know what the cause was. Sulfur might have done it. I have no idea what weapon he was using. Doaks could have misadjusted his jet mast and sent it errant. My helmet blast could have strayed.

It was a substantial window. The thing was a half foot thick. Something broke it. It didn’t break on its own. Whatever happened, it was scattered into cubes.

Normally space ships don’t have large windows. This one did double duty as the lobby’s main window, so it would have been cosmetically hard to disguise.

Had I known what was going on, I might have next expected to be sucked out into the void. That did not happen. As opposed to a vacuum, scab space is crammed to the gills with something akin to cigarette ash. It was pressurized, several times the atmosphere of the hospital’s interior air. The stuff was about one hundred degrees and registered the radioactivity of a dental x-ray.

One instant I am bashing the Meteor Beast on the head and the next I’m in an avalanche. I wound up pressed against the elevator’s doors. Then came a cascade of clicks: the hospital’s cheapo airlocks were sealing. By the time I turned myself around, the ash was the consistency of water.

My blast shield dropped. I had air. The sensors in my suit were trying to determine the volume of the ash and its degree of radioactivity--and all sorts of other data I could live without knowing. Per what I could tell, Sulfur was plastered to the ceiling of the stairwell. His scythe was back in his hands. Doaks’ jet mast had choked and died. It was somewhere in the vicinity of what was left of Nadine by the desk. Doaks and the two lab techs were gone, either swept out in some way or pushed to the other side of the now sealed airlocks.

The lobby was now shut off from the two wings of the hospital. Incredibly, I heard an airlock open down the right hall. I say ‘incredibly’ because the ship was operating the way it is supposed to. Only an idiot would over-ride the safety functions that are actually working. It would be like disarming your car’s airbags during a crash. This was no time to be playing with the airlocks. Then he did it again. And he didn’t close the airlock behind him. He was coming from the safe zone to our position. My mouth moved before I realized what I was saying “Close the airlocks behind you, you idiot! You’ll flood the entire ship!”

“The pirate appears! Where’s your hook, Captain? Where’s your eye patch? Your peg leg? Come on! At least a parrot!”

I guess Sparky found the concept of Space Police or Space Monk too improbable, so he went with pirate. The being that pierced the right airlock had a crooked human outline at its center. At least that part looked like a bent little old man. This blotch radiated flaming concentric crimson coronas. Shooting from the man’s outline and crossing every surface in the lobby were jagged blades of black. The corona rotated. Its attendant sharp lines swept in random directions. Two bladed slashes of black crossed the elevator’s doors, flashing through the ash as if it wasn’t there.

“What are you? What the hell do you want?” it bellowed as two of its black beams converged across my chest. “Some sort of undead thing? A mechanically animated corpse?—“

“—I’ve been called worse! I am justice, summoned by the people of Tiamore. And I have come for you!”

Perhaps I’m saying this in retrospect, but I wasn’t talking to the guy just to talk to him. I was waiting on my weapons reaching maximum yield. Each time I recount this in this manner, however,  Vrecky Tomlinson  believes it less. I will confess to having macho issues. I was pretty sure I was dead. And that my actions had killed all of the otherwise innocent people in this hospital. My incomprehensible focus was making Sparky dead first.

Sparky yelled back “Gibberish! Whatever you are, you’re no more metaphysical than I am!”

“Whatever I am, wherever I come from, we spit things like you off assembly lines. And we know how to dismiss the defective ones!”

I hoped. I fired, in any case.

We may have known something about creatures like Cole, who was something like creatures like Windy, but I doubt there’s any set procedure for dismissing them—or whatever the heck I’m trying to imply here. To my knowledge no one has ever tried to off a chunk of race memory. There’s no call for it.  Ours didn’t go rabid.

My baton shot straight back at me and jammed into its housing. Purple light drained from the lobby, briefly causing the floor and furniture to glow through the ash. Fast mist from what had been Sparky’s corona radiated, adding pin prick pink droplets to the mix of suspended, churning soot.  The old man’s outline was gone. Something black and curly, a knobby prehensile tail,  sprouted from the ash and bounded for the staircase.

Both Sulfur and I dove for it. It was gone in a blink. The thing was liquid, supersonic. Booms reverberated from the basement.   

Why was he going to the basement? It was the one part of the hospital with no people in it. Then the obvious dawned on me. I asked Claudia “Are there any Royce Coles in the tube vault?”

Of course there were. Why hadn’t I asked this question before?

“He’s at the control panel down here,” Claudia reported. In a chipper voice, she asked “Do you want me to jam him up?”

“Please. Anything you can do will be very much appreciated, Special Spaceman,” I said.

She issued a guttural squeal, full of mischief. I found it inspirational.

Sulfur was inspired to put his skeletal paw upon my shoulder. His eyeballs were lighting up out of sequence and he hadn’t said a word since the window broke. He may have been having problems navigating. Or he may have run out of ideas. (My guess is that he ran out of ideas four years ago.) The floaty belt dragged both of us in the direction of the staircase. I explained “I think he went this way.”

He had, indeed. Sparky had managed to pound through each and every iris of the airlocks on the way to the vault. The locks were now flower shaped fountains, spraying ash from one section to the next. Each of the exploded petals was dotted in black fluid.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this black fluid was the creature’s cell material, both its blood and its nerves. I had hurt it worse than I thought I had. It was on its last legs. Sadly. I had no inkling of this.

We weren’t dawdling, but I had concluded that the entire event was a misadventure. Nothing good was going to happen. There was no mitigating the consequences. All that had to happen was for it to end.

A moment later, I thought it had. With one turn to the left for everything that wasn’t floating, the right wall became the floor. It was on an angle to gravity and all suspended things fell to it.

Sulfur landed on his head and “meeped” at me from his pile.

“What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever been involved in a thorough disaster before? This is what it looks like,” I snarled, crawling upright.

We were caked in ash. The hallways in the basement were three quarters of the way filled. Lighting was sporadic at best, and poorly positioned. I concluded that we had popped back to real space. If so, that meant the game was over. Sparky was now free to transfer himself to any of the hundreds of bodies he had stowed on Earth.

Somewhat dispelling this notion was the feeling of movement. The entire hospital seemed to have been encountering some form of turbulence. So it was up in the air as to where we really were. For this reason, I pressed on.

I was right the first time. We were back in real space. The sensations we were experiencing involved the condition of the hospital itself. Its interior had reappeared out of alignment with its façade and foundation. Per the newspaper photo running in the next day’s Sun-Times, the foundation had spit the structure out. For a moment, the basement, its sub basement and the two wing first floor were standing like a top. There was another momentary feeling of weightlessness as it toppled and then slid down the hill. Eventually the entire intact mass came to a tumbling halt in the rear parking lot.

Had the interior of the hospital been made of something other than space freighter hull, a substance similar to diamond, the structure certainly would have broken apart. Although it fared well, I cannot say the same for everything inside the building.

I was at the now sideways staircase to the vault when the next spate of weightlessness struck. A rumbling was coming from the vault itself. It seemed as if the tube carrousel had become jammed. It was most distinctly louder than it had been before.

I pointed Sulfur in the staircase’s direction. He refused to move. So I bolted ahead. Halting my progress half way, I turned back to him and asked “Problem? Something down here?”

“You told me not to go there.”

“I’m un-telling you. This is no time to be particular,” I said. I never did figure out what the perimeters of the thing’s programming actually were.

I can’t even tell you if he followed me. One moment I was there, the next I was weightless and at the bottom of the staircase.

The actual tube vault was on the ceiling, gushing freeze water from its central chute. A bright ball of yellow was emerging from its depths. Materializing with a sparking blue outline was a glowing trapezoid. Where it was is hard to say, since the room moved the moment I caught sight of it.

What I was looking for were Claudia’s screens. If they were there, they had become shorted out.

The yellow light sprang from the chute. I fired the helmet and belt at it. The thing blistered, spat off black gobs. Its man-like outline took flight, zeroing in on the center of the trapezoid. I hit the floaty belt and charged after it.

Next: The Stunning Conclusion of Lawless Sign.